Collegiate Academies is seen by many as the crown jewel of the New Orleans charter school system, which is itself believed to be a national model for urban education. The charter operator’s flagship school, Sci Academy, boasts the best test scores of any open-enrollment high school in the city’s Recovery School District. In 2010, Oprah cut the school a $1 million check.

But this past November, a chain of events started that calls into question whether Collegiate Academies—and other New Orleans charters with similar models—will be able to maintain their success long-term.

First, students at Joseph S. Clark Preparatory High School, another New Orleans school, staged a sit-in after a beloved teacher was abruptly fired. The protest shut down junior classes for a day and got the following school day canceled while administrators decided how to respond. Leaders at Clark's charter operator, Firstline Schools, met with angry students and parents, agreed to give students a voice in hiring decisions, and reassigned the school's principal to the network office.

Days later, almost 100 students at two Collegiate Academies schools walked out. The next day, about 20 of them walked out again and staged a protest in front of their schools. They said they wanted to draw attention to what they believe are unfair discipline policies. The following month, students rallied at a nearby park after school, then walked to a school board meeting where they attempted to present the board with a list of grievances that ranged from academics ("We have no textbooks to review when we study") to discipline ("We get disciplined for anything and everything") to food service ("We want hot meals and healthy food with taste").

What’s going on? Why the backlash against schools that are trying (and in many cases succeeding) to improve education in New Orleans? I believe the answer lies in disciplinary policies that leave students and families feeling that they are at odds with teachers and administrators. But as a teacher at a high-performing New Orleans charter school with a discipline policy that focuses on in-school consequences and positive incentives, I think it's possible to have strong achievement without oppressive discipline.

Charter schools in New Orleans have made measurable academic gains in the years since Hurricane Katrina. Test scores and graduation rates are climbing. The percentage of Recovery School District 3rd through 8th graders who passed the state's annual standardized test grew to 57 percent in 2013 from 51 percent the year before—and 28 percent in 2008. At the high-school level, New Orleans' graduation rate has surpassed the state's, growing from 54.4 percent in 2004 to 77.8 percent in 2012.

But many of the charter schools that have made these improvements rely on rigid discipline policies that can sometimes feel at odds with the city’s culture. In a city known for second lines—freewheeling street parades that feature brass bands, costumed dancers, and whoever else cares to join—it's common for schools to put tape lines on the floor and expect students—including middle- and high-schoolers—to walk in silent, single-file lines at all times. Many schools have strictly enforced policies on how students sit at their desks, how they raise their hands, and how they greet teachers in the morning.

"We get detentions or suspensions for not walking on the taped lines in the hallway."

At a time when the Obama administration is urging schools to treat suspensions "as a last resort," 11 New Orleans charter schools (including the three Collegiate schools) suspended at least a quarter of their student body during the last school year.

The tension is especially acute in high schools, which, with their marching bands, drill teams, and football squads, have long been a source of tremendous community pride. Neighborhoods turn out to watch their schools' dancers and drumlines in Mardi Gras parades, and high school homecomings receive a month of coverage in the Times-Picayune every fall.

When these sources of community identity are transformed, sometimes both rapidly and radically, by outside organizations, tensions can flare.

Carver and Clark were both once-proud high schools that struggled after Katrina and have been taken over by charter operators in the last several years. Some families see the schools’ new operators’ emphasis on rigid discipline and college- prep-at-all-costs as both foreign to the city and unfair to students.

"School is supposed to be fun sometimes," said Bianca Johnson, a mother who recently withdrew her ninth-grade son from Carver Prep, a Collegiate Academies school. "But they have them in, like, a military boot camp, and they're not giving them the chance to do something they love... It got to the point that he wasn't motivated to learn anymore."

My experience in New Orleans charter schools convinces me that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to maintain high standards for both academics and behavior without rejecting the creativity and spirit of celebration that make New Orleans unique. Across the city, there are schools that have improved academic outcomes for their students without resorting to harsh disciplinary policies, while intentionally celebrating some aspects of life in New Orleans.

At Success Preparatory Academy in the Treme, hallways are named after "hometown heroes" like chef John Besh, educational pioneer Ruby Bridges, and musician Irvin Mayfield. The Grammy award-winning Mayfield recently performed at Success while kindergarteners danced around the library.

At the elementary school where I teach, kids have an extended school day (7:45 am to 4:00 pm) for academics, but it’s not all work and no play. We celebrated Halloween with a bounce house in the school parking lot, and kids changed into costumes and trick-or-treated in the French Quarter. Come Mardi Gras, they’ll take to the streets for a parade featuring the school’s music classes and costumes they will have spent the last two months creating in art class.

Still, 71 percent of our students passed their state tests last year, and many of those who didn’t (often, students who started the school year several grade levels behind) were deemed by the state to have made "significant progress."

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I’ve worked at New Orleans schools where the attitude was, "These kids are too far behind for extracurriculars." But at my current school, administrators believe that the arts’ emphasis on creativity and self-expression is a critical component of any student’s education. Classes like art and music are referred to as "integrals" rather than "extracurriculars." And they offer students a chance not just to express themselves, but to connect with the culture of the city. The third- and fourth-graders could take twirling last semester; the middle schoolers can join a jazz band.

The schools where students are protesting have the highest suspension rates in the city. Carver Collegiate sent home 69 percent of their students at least once last school year; at Carver Prep it was 61 percent and at Clark 46 percent.Most importantly, discipline at my school is focused on in-school consequences rather than out-of-school ones. Suspensions are rare and are given only for episodes that are physically dangerous to other teachers or students.

Collegiate students report being suspended "for every little thing." "We get disciplined for anything and everything," they wrote in November. "We get detentions or suspensions for not walking on the taped lines in the hallway, for slouching, for not raising our hands in a straight line."

When I asked Collegiate Academies president Morgan Ripski about the school's discipline policies, she wrote in an e-mail, "Our mission to prepare all scholars for college success is ambitious, so every minute of our school day and year are needed to teach necessary knowledge and skills." She said the schools aim to be "fun, loving, safe, structured places."

But some community members say the schools’ emphasis on structure overshadows its other goals. "It feels like a highly punitive environment," said Eden Heilman, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who has worked with some of the protesting students. She doesn’t think teachers are ill- intentioned, just unaware of—or unprepared to deal with—some of the challenges their students face.

"You have youths that are bringing a lot of baggage to school every day, and they’re not being given an opportunity to have a bad day," Heilman said.

Collegiate Academies CEO Benjamin Marcovitz wrote in an open letter published in the Times-Picayune that in the schools' discipline systems, "rewards and praise occur far more frequently than penalties." But the protests of the last few months seem to indicate that, at least for some families, frequent "shout-out meetings" aren't enough to compensate for frequent suspensions.

New Orleans charter schools have proven that they can raise test scores. But if they're truly going to take root in the community and do decades’ worth of long-term good, they are going to have to establish discipline policies that recognize where their students are coming from, and embrace the culture of the communities they’re trying to serve.

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Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal to Trump that his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

Much more than time separates the 27th president from the 45th: from their vastly different views on economics, to their conceptions of the presidency itself.

As Donald Trump’s executive orders punishing steel and aluminum imports threaten a trade war around the globe, Republicans on Capitol Hill are debating whether to reassert Congress’s ultimate constitutional authority over tariffs and trade. This isn’t the first time the GOP has split itself in two on the question of protective tariffs. But the last time, just over 100 years ago, the Republican president’s policies were the exact opposite of Trump’s.

William Howard Taft—in his opposition to populism and protectionism, as well as his devotion to constitutional limits on the powers of the presidency—was essentially the anti-Trump. Unlike the current president, and his own predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft refused to rule by executive order, insisting that the chief executive could only exercise those powers that the Constitution explicitly authorizes.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

The debate around sexual-harassment legislation is playing out in the Maryland General Assembly, where reform advocates say leadership is loath to embrace changes.

In Maryland, legislative sessions run 90 days, from January through early April. On the final day of each session—commonly referred to by the Latin term sine die—the capital city of Annapolis lets its hair down. There is dining and dancing and parties galore as aides, lawmakers, and lobbyists celebrate having survived the season.

A few years back, at one sine die soiree hosted by a legislator, a former Annapolis aide (who requested anonymity because she remains involved in Maryland politics) took to the dance floor. “I was dancing a little bit by myself,” she recalled. “All of a sudden I hear, ‘You’re packing a little bit more than I thought back here!’ I turn around, and this legislator is dancing right behind me. I was like, ‘Ooookay. This is a little weird. I know your wife and kids.’ So I tried to subtly move away.” The legislator followed, recalled the ex-aide. And then: “He got aroused.” The young woman made a swift escape, and, she informed me, “I have not spoken to that legislator one-on-one since.”

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

The Supreme Court will consider the rights of crisis pregnancy centers, which help women “imagine what the choice of life would be like.”

Abortion is back in the Supreme Court this week. On Tuesday, the justices will hear a case on crisis pregnancy centers, the facilities established by pro-life organizations around the country to counsel women against abortion. In 2015, California passed the Reproductive FACT Act, requiring licensed clinics that provide certain services—including ultrasounds, pregnancy tests, and advice on birth control—to post information about affordable abortion and contraception services offered by the state. Unlicensed facilities that provide these services have to disclose their lack of medical certification. A network of crisis pregnancy centers, including the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), sued in response, arguing that the government is violating their right to free speech by forcing them to promote abortion.